Edward Said and contrapuntal reading: Implications for critical interventions in international relations

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 101-116

  Chowdhry, Geeta ^a  

^a NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 39049173014     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298070360010701     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. I am not suggesting that the scholarship of Edward Said has always been welcomed intellectually; indeed there have been a litany of critiques from vastly divergent perspectives and virulent personal attacks against him. See for example Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992)
2. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, 'Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said', Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 626-33
3. J. Robert Griffin, 'Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said', Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 611-25
4. Josef Massad, 'The Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?', Journal of Palestinian Studies 30, no. 1 (2000): 52-67
5. E. Alexander, 'The Professor of Terror', Commentary 88, 2 (1989): 49-50
6. Bernard Lewis, 'Orientalism: An Exchange', New York Review of Books 29, no. 13 (1982): 46-8
7. D. Porter, 'Orientalism and its Problems', in The Politics of Theory, ed. Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Dianne Loxley (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983).
8. While several advanced IR books mention Said, world politics textbooks rarely do. I took a very unscientific survey of world politics texts to see if Said's work was seen as relevant in world politics. Of the 15 books that I looked at, including some that are seen as more inclusive, I found Said mentioned in only one. Steve Smith and John Baylis, The Globalization of World Politics. An Introduction to International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) mention Said in the section on Islam. None of the other texts acknowledged or mentioned Said. However, there is an increasingly robust use of Said's work in the discipline by several critical scholars many of whom are sympathetic to, or self identify as, postcolonial. Postcolonial and critical scholars in whose work Edward Said is influential, perhaps even foundational include, P. Darby and A. J. Paolini, 'Bridging International Relations and Postcolonialism', Alternatives 19, no. 3 (1994): 371-93
9. Roxanne Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
10. Randolph Persaud, 'Frantz Fanon, Race and the World Order', in Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, ed. S. R. Gill and J. H. Mittleman (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 1997)
11. Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds.), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2002)
12. L.H.M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
13. Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 2004)
14. A. Agathangelou, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
15. Randolph B. Persaud and R.B. J. Walker (eds), Alternatives 26, no. 4 (2001)
16. Sankaran Krishna, 'Race, Amnesia and the Education of International Relations', Alternatives 26, no. 4 (2001): 401-24
17. Pal Ahluwalia and Michael Sullivan, 'Beyond International Relations: Edward Said and the World', in International Relations - Still an American Social Science? Towards Diversity in International Thought, ed. Robert M. A. Crawford and Daryl S. L. Jarvis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001)
18. Anna Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, 'The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poisies of Worldism', International Studies Review 6, no. 4 (2004): 21-49
19. Claire Heristchi, 'The Politics of Dispossession, Belonging and Hope: Remembering Edward Said', Alternatives 30, no. 3 (2005): 251-73.
20. Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, 'Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11', International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2004): 517-38.
21. Other critical scholars in IR have also used a variety of 'epistemological practices' to challenge the conventional methodologies of IR. See, for example, James Der Derian and M. J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989)
22. Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
23. Stephen Gill (ed.), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
24. Robert Cox, 'Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 12, no. 2 (1983): 162-75
25. Mark Rupert, Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
26. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)
27. J. Anne Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Principles on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)
28. J. Ann Tickner, '"What is Your Research Program?" Some Feminist Answers to International Relations' Methodological Questions', International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2005): 1-22
29. V. S. Peterson and A. S. Runyan, Global Gender Issues: Dilemmas in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). See also note 2.
30. Agathangelou and Ling, 'Power, Borders, Security, Wealth', 535.
31. According to Aamir Mufti, 'Said's most influential contribution to these debates is of course the concept and metaphor - evocative, dense, and elusive at the same time - of contrapuntiality, first employed in 1984 in the essay "Reflections on Exile," but finding its fullest elaboration in Culture and Imperialism'. Aamir Mufti, 'Global Comparativism', in Edward Said. Continuing the Conversation, eds. Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 109-26
32. Edward W. Said, 'Reflections on Exile', Granta 13 (Autumn 1984): 159-72
33. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).
34. Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 93.
35. Edward W. Said, 'Jane Austen and Empire', in The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayami and Andrew Rubin (NewYork: Vintage Books, 2000), 367.
36. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51.
37. Ibid., 66-7.
38. Said discusses his affinity to Western music and his inability, as a young boy, and even as an adult to a certain extent, to find traditional Arabic music appealing. See, for example, Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999)
39. and Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
40. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 59-60.
41. Edward Said quoted in Colin Symes, 'The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and Musical Transgression', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27, no. 3 (2006): 309-24.
42. See 'An Interview with Edward Said', in The Edward Said Reader, 419-44.
43. Elsa Barkley Brown, 'African-American Women's Quilting: A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American Women's History', Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 921-9.
44. I was first alerted to Elsa Barkley Brown's elaborations on quilting by African-American women through Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
45. Collins, Fighting Words. Black Women and the Search for Justice, 248.
46. Steve Smith, 'Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11', International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2004): 499-515.
47. Collins, Fighting Words. Black Women and the Search for Justice, 249.
48. While Said's remarks were not about the field of IR, they can be applied easily to it. See Said, Culture and Imperialism, 318.
49. Krishna, 'Race, Amnesia and the Education of International Relations', 404-05.
50. Krishna, 'Race, Amnesia and the Education of International Relations', 407.
51. Siba Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
52. See Krishna 'Race, Amnesia and the Education of International Relations' for a contrapuntal analysis of Hugo Grotius and international law based on the contributions of Grovogui.
53. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans, 43.
54. Much has been written about the cultural pronouncements of Huntington and Edward Said. The point here is not to claim that my recovery of Said is in any way totally original, rather my effort is to demonstrate what a contrapuntal reading of culture might offer IR.
55. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
56. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon, 1981)
57. Benjamin J. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996)
58. Frances Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992)
59. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the ReMaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
60. Samuel P. Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', Foreign Policy, March/April (2004). http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/ cms.php?story_id=2495&print=1 (accessed 9 February 2007).
61. See Philippa Strum and Andrew Selee (eds.), The Hispanic Challenge? What We Know about Latino Immigration (Washinton, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 2004).
62. The cultural turn in IR includes constructivist and postmodern approaches that are distinct from the realism of Huntington. See, for example, David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)
63. J. Weldes, M. Laffey, H. Gusterson and R. Duvall (eds.), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
64. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the ReMaking of World Order, 24.
65. Huntington's proposition that civilizational clashes are inevitable because civilizational differences between Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Latin American and other cultures are irreconcilable has been critiqued methodologically, epistemologically and ontologically. Since the critiques of Huntington's 'clash of civilization' thesis are quite numerous and are listed elsewhere, I will not develop these in this essay. While Barber and Fukuyama's arguments are quite distinct from those of Huntington discussed above, there is some overlap between them; all three assume the superiority of Western culture over non-Western ones, and all three assume a conflictual relationship between Western and non-Western cultures. In this world view, 'the end of ideology', 'Jihad vs. McWorld', 'the clash of civilizations', are all based on the dichotomies of the 'west' and the 'rest' in which culture is treated as a discrete, separate and pure civilizational category.
66. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 'Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference', Cultural Anthropology, 7, no. 1 (1992): 6-23.
67. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 14.
68. Colin Symes, 'The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and Musical Transgression', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27, no. 3 (2006): 309-24.
69. Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii-xiii.
70. Edward W. Said, 'The Clash of Ignorance,' Media Monitors Network. http://www.mediamonitiors.net/edward40.html (accessed 15 February 2007).
71. Edward W. Said, 'Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified',2.http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/crisis/said.htm (accessed 15 February 2007).
72. Said reports that the book by Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) suggests that 'Islam has no interest in Western music'. Said goes on to write about the famous conservatories of Western music in 'Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Tunis, Rabbat, Amman - even Ramallah on the West Bank'. Said, 'Impossible Histories', 4.
73. Jan Jindy Pettman, 'Transcending National Identity: The Global Political Economy of Gender and Class', in International Relations - Still an American Social Science?, 255-76.
74. Mufti, 'Global Comparativism': 115.
75. Homi Bhabha, 'Adagio', in Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, 12.
76. Said quoted in Bhabha, 'Adagio', 12.
77. Stephen Howe, 'An Interview with Edward Said', Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1(2006): 59.
78. Gil Z. Hochberg, 'Edward Said: "The Last Jewish Intellectual". On Identity, Alterity and the Politics of Memory', Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006): 47-65. Hochberg demonstrates the attentiveness of Said to both Palestinian and Israeli memory in understanding the roots of Palestinian dispossession. He argues that only an institutional recognition of these memories will help pave the path towards peace.
79. 'The Hispanic Challenge' has evoked much discussion. Lack of space prevents me from discussing the responses and providing a contrapuntal response to all the points raised by Huntington. My effort here, however, is to highlight what I consider to be the most salient counterpoints.
80. See Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', 1.
81. 'The values, institutions and culture of early white settlers provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries. . . . By the latter years of the 19th century however, the ethnic component had been broadened to include Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians, and the United States' religious identity was being redefined more broadly from Protestant to Christian'.
82. Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', 1. Clearly Huntington's analysis of ethnic and racial identity in the making of the United States is riddled with flaws. First, he treats whiteness as norm and does not see it as a racialised identity that was construded for the pursuit of power and privilege. Second, the history of forced migrations from Africa is ignored as is the history of Asian Immigrants, Latinos/Chicanos and indigenous peoples and the centrality of their labour to the development of the United States.
83. Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', 8.
84. Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', 10. Responding to the allegation that his work promotes violence against Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans because of his allegedly sloppy research and alleged stereotyping of Mexican Americans as lazy, lacking ambition, etc., Huntington informs us that his stereotypes are taken from his Mexican-American informant! For a view of the letters to the editor written in response to Huntington's article and Huntington's response to those letters see Foreign Policy, May/June (2004).
85. Huntington, 'The Hispanic Challenge', 11.
86. Hochberg, 'Edward Said: "The Last Jewish Intellectual"', 48.
87. Homi K. Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation', in H. K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, trans. Martin Thom (London: Routledge, 1990),
88. cited in Cecelia Elizabeth O'Leary, 'Clasping Hands over the Bloody Divide: Memory, Amnesia and Racism', American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 160.
89. While Hispanic is the term used in the US census, scholars writing in this area generally prefer to use the term Latin√Chican· Latin√ Chicanis a term used to include Latina(o)s and Chicana(o)s.
90. The treaty 'established a new border' between the United States and Mexico, 'provided official recognition of the previous annexation of Texas, and provided for the payment by the United States of 15 million dollars to Mexico in exchange for Mexico's former northern provinces'. One third of Mexico's territory was ceded to the United States including Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas. In addition, approximately 75,000 to 100,000 Mexicans became US citizens overnight with the promise that they would be granted all the rights of citizenship including the protection of their property. While the treaty guaranteed individuals in the newly acquired territories the rights of citizenship, the majority of Mexican Americans were not accorded these rights. They suffered loss of land and economic disenfranchisement, and were forced into unskilled, low-paying jobs. In addition, the influx of white immigrants to the Southwest relegated Mexican Americans to a minority status which, in concert with literacy tests, poll tax, the construction of 'white man's primaries', intimidation and violence, ensured their political disenfranchisement. Racist stereotypes about Mexican Americans, prevalent before the Mexican-American wars, increased as Mexicans became more disempowered. See David C. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 13-38.
91. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 29.
92. See Edward D. Garza, LULAC: The League of United Latin American Citizens (San Francisco: R and E Research Associate, 1972).
93. See Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988), 307-62 for a discussion of radical movements. Although the United Farm Workers movement led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta was a farm labour movement, it did adopt ethnic identity-based politics in some of its strategies.
94. Robert Suro, 'Known Knowns and Unknown Knowns', in The Hispanic Challenge?, eds. Strum and Selee, 5.
95. Ricardo D. Stanton-Salazar, 'The Integration of Latino Students', in Ibid., 23.
96. Elizabeth M. Grieco, 'The Foreign Born from Mexico in the United States: 1960-2000', in Ibid., 7.
97. J. Ann Tickner, 'On the Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power? Feminist Practices of Responsible Scholarship', International Studies Review 8, no. 3 (2006): 383-95.
98. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 14.
99. Edward W. Said, 'On Defiance and Taking Positions', American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 31. http://www.acls.org/ op31said.htm (accessed 15 February 2007), 1-5.